Feminist Foreign Policy
Nordic Model
Margot Wallstrom

Margot Wallstrom’s feminist foreign policy and Nordic Model / Equality Model
In October 2014 Foreign Minister Margot Wallström announced that their country Sweden would henceforth follow a Feminist Foreign Policy as the first country globally. Throughout their foreign policy the Swedish Government has since applied a systematic gender equality perspective. In 2018 the Swedish Government published a handbook outlining the details of their feminist approach.
Nov 4, 2019 – Barbara Crossette for PassBlue writes:
Wallstrom resigned as foreign minister in September to spend more time with her family — her husband, two sons and three grandchildren. Suffering from a thyroid condition that needed medication, she has relaxed and retreated to her home on a Swedish country lake where, she said, she swims almost year round.
Wallstrom wants to stay engaged in a debate growing more acrimonious among feminists globally about a widening, well-funded campaign to repeal laws everywhere against prostitution for both buyers and sellers of sex. The decriminalization campaign has drawn critics among many feminists who work among the poorest and most vulnerable girls and women, not only in developing countries but also in Western Europe, who are trafficked into the sex industry.
“To me it’s so clear: how can we continue to work toward gender equality as long as women can be bought as a piece of meat?” Wallstrom said.
She believes that UN Women, the agency protecting women’s rights (which says it is neutral in the sex trade debate) needs to bring the issue into more open discussion among feminists and others with clashing views of how to deal with the multibillion dollar sex industry.
“I really think UN Women are struggling,” Wallstrom said. “They have to consider how best to deal with the fact that here there are really two camps [on prostitution]. At the moment they are at war, and that’s never a good thing, because it would hurt the whole cause for women, the whole agenda. They have to find a way to move on. This cannot be allowed to overshadow everything else.”
Sweden pioneered what is called the Nordic legislative model, which makes buying — but not selling — sex illegal, putting the law on the side of women who are often victims of violence and sex slavery. Wallstrom has gone out at night with police officers and social workers to study how the policy works in Stockholm, where women are given a hotline number if they need help. She compares that system to the freewheeling situation in Germany and other European countries where prostitution is more or less completely legal and megabrothels flourish.
“The official figure today is that 400,000 women were working as prostitutes in Germany,” she said. “Do you think that they are Germans, middle class women, who think that this looks like a nice job — something that I would recommend to my daughter? Of course not.”
Among the women in brothels, she added, “98 percent come from Ukraine, from Moldova, from Nigeria — from poor countries around the world. They’re all trafficked there, and it’s like hell on earth,” she says, quoting from a 2018 study by Ingeborg Kraus, a scholar in Germany, where prostitution has been legal since 2002.